You know, I used to bullseye small thermal exhaust ports in my T16 back home, they're not much smaller than womp rats.
You know, I used to bullseye T16s in my womp rat back home, they're not much bigger than thermal exhaust ports.
Readit Newsscubakid commented on GPT-5 openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd
Wild - I hit the same "no financial software meets my needs" around the same time as you guys (late 2020 in my case), and started building for myself as well: https://github.com/mieubrisse/wealthdraft
Only, I never had the courage to make the leap to building an actual product out of it. Huge congrats to you guys; going to take a look at Projection and see if I can finally retire my homegrown stuff!
cool project. I always found java a little verbose for my taste, but I bet this runs faster than our sim engine! (it's in typescript)
Good question. The main problem I had was being too slow scaling up from 1 person. Building a good team is tricky, it's very hard to convince great devs to join you when you are by yourself at a time when they had a pick of jobs from FAANG. Even if you can match the salary of well funded startups, other companies can offer working with a larger team.
So you have three options: 1. hire sub-par people, 2. get VC funding to hire an entire team, or 3. continue doing most stuff by yourself.
I tried hiring sub-par people. That was a mistake, they took way more effort and negative energy than I got in return from the salary I paid them. I did not want to take on VC funding to be able create a large team at once, and in hindsight I think that was a good idea because several of my competitors did, and then had to fold 5 years later when they ran out of funding and their revenue was not high enough. (Also, the freedom of being a 100% owner and not having anyone tell you what to do was a major quality of life improvement for me that I never want to give up again once I tasted it. I hope you savor it as I do!)
So being smarter about hiring is what I would do differently, but that's easier said than done. I think the job market today probably does have more high quality devs available that don't mind being employee number two.
Edit: to add, once competitors appeared it became much more of a marketing game than a web dev game, because customers just tend to click the first three google hits. Getting good at marketing, and hiring the right people for that, is a whole other ballgame if you're a dev.
I think there's a certain type of engineer that actively prefers working in a small team where you can make an outsized impact and wear many hats. I'm one of them lol.
I wonder if you could bring on just one really good dev who matches that description vs scaling up to a larger team. In many cases, a very small team of A+ players can beat a large team of B players.
Although it sounds like you're saying marketing/distribution may have played a larger role in your trajectory? In hindsight, do you think focusing your team-building efforts on the marketing side would have been a better strategy?
Congrats. A word of warning: I scaled my SaaS site to $1M in AAR in a few years, but then a lot of competition appeared and a decade later it's still at only $1.5M. I have a good time running it and I can live comfortably while feeding my team, but with my initial success I had hoped it would go up further faster. So keep those expectation low, the next million may not come as easily as the first.
Knowing what you know now, is there anything strategic you would have done differently after reaching that 1M ARR milestone?
Probably a couple of hours on support per day on average, some days less, some days more. The vast majority of users don't ask for support, they prefer to read the docs, read the community forum, goggle stuff or hunt-and-peck options in the app. Roughly 90% use the free version. If everyone used the paid version I could have a very large team, but the reality is the product competes with many free tools.
If you update the app or refine docs in response to previous support questions it does streamline the experience but there are always folks who just don't read docs and there are many who will purchase the app just for access to support so they can figure something out.
I'm sure some apps are more support heavy than others, but ours is aimed at system administrators and with that comes an assumed level of competence (in reality, many people are only in the role because nobody else could/would do it but even they are quite independently resourceful).
The disadvantage of users helping themselves is that you don't get feedback from them or learn about their use cases. Knowing how/why people are using your stuff is really valuable for development, so if I had the team for it then dedicated support engineers would follow up with customers early on even if they don't have issues.
Did you consider adding an optional survey (or just an input or two) somewhere in setup or the onboarding flow? I bet some % of people would willingly tell you how/why they are using the software.
Thanks for sharing your impressive journey. It's always refreshing to see a story that promotes grit and resilience, rather than the instant exponential growth often glorified by wannabe millionaires online.
Glad to hear it resonated. And also glad I didn't start this project with the expectation of quick success, hype, or exponential growth. If I had, there's no way I would have made it through the slower early years.
Doesn't fucking matter even if you reach a billion dollars with a boring ass business of drawing financial charts. Those charts are manipulated by HFTs, hedge funds and what not. It is naive to think you, a retail investor, stand a chance
you might enjoy The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins.
Great job on this webapp, it's a really easy-to-use platform. I've toyed with the same startup idea myself, having tracked my personal finances and life projection for years now using Google Sheets, Grafana and other tools.
Just an annecdotal bit of feedback: I would like to continue using ProjectionLab but $109/year is beyond what I'm willing to spend, especially given ProjectionLab doesn't integrate with any live tracking of property prices / investment portfolio valuation etc.
If it were $40/year I probably would subscribe. But $109 is too much to justify (and I am reasonably well off).
Have you A/B tested different pricing levels to find the sweet spot that maximises revenue?
We've done some pricing experimentation over the years, and it's possible we're actually still positioned too cheap right now for the value the platform provides.
Personal finance is a pretty broad space, and it's common for different people to come to this with varying desires and expectations.
In our experience, the people who see the value in a good long-term DIY financial plan view our current pricing as extremely affordable, especially compared to traditional financial planning services which often charge $3-5k for a PDF and a pat on the back.
Anyway, if automated tracking is the piece that's most important to you, it might be worth noting that we do plan to add more options for that. But that work -- and all the other controversial implications of it that I mentioned in another comment -- just needs to be prioritized against all the other highly requested things on the product roadmap, based on what the community really wants the most.
"We"? Are you the owner? If so you know much more than me!
Yep, I wrote the post!
I'd say we reached PMF a couple years ago the way I define it (solid customer acquisition from organic sources & word-of-mouth, strong retention, sustainable growth).
I was just curious if others might look at it differently, since I know definitions can vary. And like you said, some people might look at this update and dismiss it as still really small-time.
It looks really good. Would it make much difference that I'm not USA based, (live in the UK). I.e. in terms of tax pensions pensions etc.
I noticed most tools neglect international scenarios because the US market is big and it's easier to focus on that. So I decided to be different and try to build with as much international flexibility as possible. We have a bunch of international account types and tax preseta, including some for the UK.